Please answer each of the following points whoever thinks the 1388 / 2009 elections were fair:
-Why would Mousavi, Karubi, Khatami, and Rafsanjani who all had highest posts from prime minister to president to parliament speaker and the person who put Khamenei as leader, want to overthrow their own regime through a color revolution?
The answer is in your question. These guys were the elites of the system. With Rafsanjani (8 years President), Khatami (8 years President), Mousavi (8 years Prime Minister), Karoubi (head of majlis), all controlling the regime for the all those years, they did not like it that a new group was entering the scene. Ahmadenijad's first win was an unexpected shock to them. The second time, they refused to let it happen again. Do we not remember the chain murders between '88 and '98 which some linked to Rafsanjani? These are the sort of people who are ready to say anything, do anything, claim anything, to remain in power, and a wild card like Ahmadenijad, who was not part of the elite system, was terrifying.
Let me remind you that the first time Rafsanjani lost agains Ahmadenijad, he also screamed that there was fraud. At that time, no one listened, because no one care for him. He learned from this, and planned better next time.
Why do such treason against the people if people voted for someone else?
Power.
Why dont officials agree to public trial against Mousavi and Karubi and present all the facts to gain trust of people, why resort to illegal house arrest? Why are they afraid of public trial?
Because sometimes a country's stability and security is the highest importance. To put them on a trial, at the moment, will open a lot of wounds, and there will a renewal of conflicts. The best way to handle a volatile situation is to keep it as calm as possible.
-How did Ahmadinejad win in every single candidates home city / province? Mousavi, Karubi, Rezaee all lost their home provinces. This never happens. Ethnic candidate always do well in home provinces and among their people.
For example in 2013, in Boyer-Ahmad province which is Rezaees ethnicity, Rezaee won that province with huge 145,000 votes. In 2009, when overall turnout was HIGHER, Rezaee LOSES that province and gets only 9,000 votes. That is 16 times difference during a time where voter turnout was lower!
For Karubi, in 2005, he received 440,000 votes in home province of Lorestan and won that province. In 2009 where voter turnout was higher, he only received 44,000 in that home province. That is a TEN times difference.
Same story with Mousavi and how he lost Azeri provinces. This is unprecedented in Iranian elections and laughable.
Iranians do not vote merely based on ethnic lines. Why then have elections? Just say give the hometowns to the candidates and not waste anyone's time. Ghalibaf is ethnically Kurd. Do we now expect every Kurd to vote for Ghalibaf? Did he win in Kurdish votes last time?
All three of your examples have clear reasons if you think about it closely. For example, Karoubi. In 2005, he was a legitimate possibility of winning. In the first round, he got 17.24%. In 2009, he was by no means a serious contender. Early on, it was obvious that the elections was between Ahmadenijad & Mousavi. In your example, 440,000 out of 5,070,114 votes he received in 2005 is 8%. In 2009, the loreston contribution is 6.4%. This is not that far from each other. As Karoubi becomes a less serious contender, then not only does his overall votes fall, but so does his niche votes.
Same with Mousavi. Why would Mousavi get an automatic win just because he is Azari? The Leader is Azari, and a lot of voters who felt strongly about the leader, felt strongly about Ahmadenijad. So, wouldn't an Azari voter who loves Azari Khamaeni, vote for Ahmadenijad? When it felt that Mousavi & Khameini had a falling out before?
And keep this in mind. Mousavi had been out of the political scene for many years and people didn't really remember him and many younger did not even know him, while Ahmadenijad was governor of Ardabil for 2 years.
-Rezaee confirmed that the number of people that prior to election had given his party their IDs and said they will vote for him was lower than actual votes on election day.
This is a joke. This is like Karoubi when he said the solution was to ask all his supporters to come to a location, and all of Ahmadenijad's supporters to also come, and to see who is more. Come on.
Rezaee, who is conservative, ALSO complained of fraud. So former IRGC commander was part of color revolution too? He only withdrew his complaint after some time when Khamenei drew red lines.
The conservative/reformist is a joke. Rafsanjani was suddenly a reformist? Karoubi was a reformist? Larijani is suppose to be a conservative, but he hated Ahmadenijad, and he is much better with Rouhani. The only distinction was elites vs non-elites.
-Why did Khamenei confirm election results right after election, before Guardian council independently confirmed results? This was unprecedented. This was so odd that some people thought maybe Ahmadineajd had took Khamenei hostage and forced him to do it.
Remember when Larijani congratulated Mousavi before the results were confirmed? Why did that happen? Why for the first time ever, certain elites tried to claim Mousavi won, when there were no results yet?
-During first week of protests, Qalibaf confirms that one of the days, 3 million people came out to protest for Mousavi in city of Tehran. This is while Mousavis votes for entire province of Tehran was 3.4 million...so pretty much every single Mousavi voter in the province had to come out which is highly unlikely. A better explanation is Mousavis votes in Tehran were much higher than 3.4 million... Or maybe Qalibaf was involved in color revolution too and purposely exaggerated the protesters?
Qalibaf didn't like Ahmadenijad either. Ever regime elite wanted Ahmadenijad as away from the system as far as possible.
Refute:
http://brill-law.com/iran-2009-election---100710.html#StatisticalAnalysisBODY
Here are some articles that call into question the relevancy of Benford's Law in detecting fraud.
https://academic.oup.com/pan/articl...ord-s-Law-and-the-Detection-of-Election-Fraud
"It is not simply that the Law occasionally judges a fraudulent election fair or a fair election fraudulent. Its “success rate” either way is essentially equivalent to a toss of a coin, thereby rendering it problematical at best as a forensic tool and wholly misleading at worst."
data from Ohio, Massachusetts and Ukraine, a
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ae6b/9811d93caeda15ab8ad7060ee474cc186860.pdf
"However, looking at data from Ohio, Massachusetts and Ukraine, a s well as data artificially generated by a series of simulations, we argue here that Benford’s Law is essentially useless as a forensic indicator of fraud. "
http://thomaslotze.com/iran/
This article goes through it one by one and compares even US elections.
https://datatodisplay.com/blog/politics/benfords-law-elections-2/
"It has been suggested that the distribution of second digits in electoral data can be used as a possible indicator of fraud and that this circumnavigates the problem associated with (roughly) constant constituency/precinct size that can lead to deviations from Benford’s law for the first digit. Data from the (presumably fraud-free) UK general election of 2010 seems to follow the posited second-digit distribution closely. However, I am yet to be convinced there is any compelling reason to expect clean electoral data to follow it in general and fraudulent election results to differ. Hence I’m currently unconvinced of the usefulness of studying second digits as a tool in election forensics."
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/unconvincing-to-me-use-of-benfords-law/
"I don’t buy it. First off, the whole first-digit-of-7 thing seems irrelevant to me. Second, the sample size is huge, so a p-value of 0.007 isn’t so impressive. After all, we wouldn’t expect the model to really be true with actual votes. It’s just a model! Finally, I don’t see why we should be expecting distributions to be lognormal. Maybe there’s something I’m missing here, but that’s my quick take. This is not to say that I think the election was fair, or rigged, or whatever–I have absolutely zero knowledge on that matter–just that I don’t find this analysis convincing of anything."
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/note18jun2009.pdf
Even those who seem to claim there was a fraud based on this law, still have to add a caveat like this,
"Caveat: It is important to be clear that none of the estimates or test results in this report are proof that substantial fraud affected the 2009 Iranian election. The results suggest very strongly that there was widespread fraud in which the vote counts for Ahmadinejad were substantially augmented by artificial means"
"-Higher turnout means people coming out to demand change. This is the case for every election. Low turnout favours the status quo. Karbaschi said 'If more than 32 million votes are cast, the possibility that Ahmadinjad will not win is over 65 percent," he said. "But if 27 million people or less vote, the likelihood of a change is less than 35 percent' turnout was huge, 85% with 39 million people...and everything turned out as flipped as expected.
http://www.webcitation.org/5hAJtahRw?url=http://www.newsobserver.com/1635/story/1538805.html"
Such predictions have always shown to be not that useful. Remember the predictions regarding Trump? Some predicted landslide Clinton victory. I remember numbers as high as 90% being thrown around.
-How did Ahmadienjad win with 24.5 million votes, and was 'disqualified' to run now? Were 24.5 million people wrong in voting for him? Or maybe, the 24.5 million figure is ridiculous in the first place since he never got that much votes. Ahmadinejad had some support among poor due to populist policies but the 24.5 million is a joke.
This is a ridiculous reasoning. Khatami was banned for running too. Does this mean Khatami's presidency was a fraudulent?
In 2001, Khatami which is 100% reform candidate not even a moderate, received nearly 22 million votes with only 68% turnout. And that is during a time where some Iranians were dissapointed in Khatami and did not vote, and some other also did not vote because he would win anyway. Yet he still received 22 million! In 2009 Iranians political positions flipped 180 degrees and Ahmadinejad got 24.5 million? During a time where so much opposition was mounting to Ahmadinejad? What a joke.
Iranians are not Americans or Europeans. They don't vote on Left/Right lines. In US, a democratic voter votes for a democratic. Only a certain percentage of them flip. In Iran, such a thing does not exist. Reformist/Principalist exists more in the mind of politicians and the media. This is because in Iran, there is no two party system, nor as left/right distinctions very clear. if anything, someone like Ahmadenijad had a lot of financial socialist policies, so he should be more left than right.
As long as we think in US election or European ways of elections, we will constantly get Iran wrong.
Anyway as I said earlier most peoples eyes are open and they are not fooled by smearing campaigns. A fair public trial would be the best way to settle this and restore confidence. However, seeing how so many years has passed by and illegal house arrest has continued, I am not too hopeful...
A public trial is not the right time for now. Society's well being and interest takes precedence over two political elites who put stability at risk for their own selfish reasons. Iranian "liberals" always cry fraud when they lose, but the system is fantastic when they win. When Ahmadenijad won both times, there were cries of fraud. When Rouhani won, the system was perfect. When Ahmadenijad was banned for running, "liberals" did not complain about unfairness. I put "liberals" in quotes, because they are not true liberals. They are just wanna western liberals, who somehow think that someone like Karoubi, Rafsanjani, Mousavi, Rouhani, and Nadeq Nouri are somehow reformists while someone like Ahmadenijad, who actually did a lot of actual REFORM isnt.
Does anyone know where I can find manifestos or concrete plans for Rouhani and Qalibaf, if they have them? Campaign rallies and speeches are also useful.
My bro Ghalibaf:
http://www.aparat.com/tag/انتخابات96-دکتر محمدباقر قالیباف
Here is his campaign ad:
http://www.aparat.com/v/Pz58t
